Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System

There was much talk last fall about the grimmer-than-usual regular report from the Sentencing Project, which found that, at any given time, one in three black men in their 20s is in prison, on probation or on parole. How one reacted to those statistic was probably colored by both race and by previous encounters with the criminal justice system. With this tightly argued and methodologically sound volume, Miller, a criminal justice expert from the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, will make readers think about some widespread social assumptions associating crime and African American men. Most black men who come in contact with the criminal justice system do so for relatively minor infractions; and even when charges aren't pressed, many black men are saddled with undeserved records that can cause trouble in finding a job and with any future brushes with law enforcement. But the greatest change in the prosecution of black men in recent years has been the ""war on drugs,"" which has brought about not only tougher sentences on users of crack cocaine but also alarming arrest rates. Several areas around the country show similar statistics: 90% of those arrested on drug charges are black in areas where African Americans make up only 11%-12% of the population. The percentage of new inmates being incarcerated on drug charges has surpassed those sent to prison for violent offenses. Some may find Miller's discussion of the genetic presupposition of criminality suggested by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve a little tangential, but it does address underlying biases that have tangible influence on policy. All in all, this serves as one of the most important and clear-eyed challenges to date to the linking of crime and race and to the entire conservative anti-welfare, hard-on-crime agenda. (June)